Apps Messaging: security

[John Taylor]

I should point out that we are sending the private ids across the  
wire in the clear.  Can I take it that everyone is happy with that?   
I really think that any form of encryption would be overkill.



On 10 Apr 2007, at 13:31, Mark Taylor wrote:

> On Tue, 10 Apr 2007, John Taylor wrote:
>
>>> It is probably wise to make that information available, for instance
>>> there may be messages which pass around the public IDs of an  
>>> application
>>> which originated a data object, and the originating application  
>>> might
>>> need to identify itself in this context.  In which case it looks  
>>> like
>>>
>>>   (secret-id,public-id) = register*(hub-secret)
>>
>> Yes, that's probably better than providing a
>>
>> public-id=getPublicId(secret-id)
>>
>> which would be vulnerable to brute force.  Alternatively, we could  
>> define the
>
> actually that would be OK, and maybe tidier - we're vulnerable to  
> brute force in any case (app.exec(secret-id,args="rm -r .")). We  
> can just recommend that secret-ids ought to be hard to guess.
>
>> public id of an app to be a digest of the private id.  Too  
>> complicated?
>
> neat, but would require access to MD5 libraries or whatever in  
> application
> code which is undesirable.
>
>
> -- 
> Mark Taylor   Astronomical Programmer   Physics, Bristol  
> University, UK
> m.b.taylor at bris.ac.uk +44-117-928-8776 http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/ 
> ~mbt/
>